Has It Really Been a Year?

That's what I asked myself when I came across the annual Eulogy For the Dying Art of Fiction In America in the SF Bay Guardian. Heck, it's only the last week of May. Jonathan Yardley ran through the checklist (1. Writing workshops are to blame; 2. Literary fiction fails to engage the larger society; 3. Ironically, sometimes "genre" fiction achieves higher excellence than effete literary fiction; 4. Contemporary fiction is stuck in a dead end of style over substance…&c.) back in July of last year. B.R. Myers' laundry list hit newsstands in June the year before. Jonathan "Don't Correct Me While I'm Saving Civilization" Franzen's sermonette in Harpers—well, that was back when Osama bin Laden was still living in Sudan. So this year's requiem is a bit early, but still in the ballpark.

This year's undertaker Paul Reidinger employs a relatively original method: Rather than calling for the Great American Novel to become even greater, he takes aim at the very concept of the G.A.M.—that bloated, flatulent slab of Important Fiction that measures greatness through girth alone. (I kept wondering, though: Isn't the central idea of Great American Novelism that the Great American Novel hasn't been written yet, and only exists as a kind of chimera or Platonic ideal?) As I am partial to criticism that measures literature by the metric tonne, I found much in Reidinger's essay to agree with. But little in his pompous, windy, snooty style to enjoy.